Apologies for my absence from the forum, I've been busily working away at the interactive whiteboard face at school. Events at school have absorbed a lot of my time, but I thought that I woudl take this opportunity to share the fruits of my labours.

The attached booklets are not perfect and represent a work in progress that addresses the particular concerns of my school. about 3 years ago, GCSE History had its curriculum time reduced to 2 hours a week. There simply was not enough enough curriculum time to deliver all the content, so I had to find a way of reducing the time my students spent making notes and instead focusing on the core skills that were being assessed by OCR. The nature of our students mean that many of them do not revise and the attendence of some means that they miss key sections of the course. When it came to revision they rarely took their books home or the expensive revision booklets that we had spent ages designing for them.

I cast around for a long time looking at the ideas of colleagues at SHP and local schools and eventually came up with the attached formula which works very well for my students. It combines both a revision booklet with built in exam board questions and pupil mark schemes. The idea being to give them the revision notes at the start of each topic, instead of wasting time marking notes. This then gave us the opportunity to spend more time getting our students to do past paper questions which tested their core knowledge and skills. This in turn helped to not only reduce our workload, but gave us a far better picture of their progress and provided us with all sorts of wonderful opportunities for peer and self assessment!

A typical history lesson will begin the usual starters and hooks, followed by a short teacher presentation using either the text book or some form of multimedia. We may well make some summary notes into a graphic organiser of the types I discussed in my whiteboard seminar. This part of the lesson will most probably take between 20 - 30 minutes. I will then dish out my class set of highligter pens and get them to summarise the information in the revision section for 10 minutes before setting them one of the exam questions in exam conditions. They then swap and use the pupil mark schemes to peer and self assess each others answers, write constructive comments and then feedback to each other. Once in a while, I will use my viewer to display someone's answer on the IWB and get the class to have a go at marking it. If they struggle with an answer we will then have a go at modelling an answer on the board so that they know what a good one looks like.

Anyway, I'll chip in a little more later on in the seminar, please do have a look at the resources below, feel free to share them, play with them and make them suit your own educational environment. They are not perfect, but by the time my students have loved them to death and customised them with their own answers and feedback, they always take them home with them to revise.

Kind Regards

Roy

PS Why reinvent the wheel?

Edited by Roy Huggins, 31 March 2011 - 06:37 PM.

"Men are disturbed, not by the things that happen, but by their opinion of the things that happen." - Epictetus

These resources are constantly under review and are by no means perfect but I would like to thank the following people for helping to suggest ideas, redraft ideas and put a lot of effort into themselves in creating some of the resources:

If you don' teach OCR MWH you could easily extract the revision section and just download the last three years worth of exam board questions from your board and create your own AFL section.

The mistake that I made maybe 5 years ago was to leave doing past paper questions until the end of the course. Now, due the shortage of curriculum time, my students do past paper questions rather than notes. You'll notice how I've cleverly created some of my own exam style questions so that all the topics are covered.

The beauty of this system is that its a pleasure to mark the questions, the students get immediate feedback from their peers and the opportunity to share the learning. Whenever I've been observed by Ofsted, HMI, LEA etc I've always got at least good with outstanding withe this sort of lesson. It works, although variety is the spice of ife so don't forget to vary it once in a while - my poor Year 10s!

Kind Regards

Roy

"Men are disturbed, not by the things that happen, but by their opinion of the things that happen." - Epictetus